She crossed over the first bisecting avenue to the westward, and the
second; she passed a few pedestrians, among them being a policeman
trying door latches, a drunken man whose body swayed and whose legs
wove queer patterns as he walked, and half a dozen pale, bearded men who
spoke Yiddish and gestured volubly with their hands as they went by in
a group. At Third Avenue she turned north, finding the pavements more
thickly populated, and just after she came to where Fourteenth Street
crosses she saw a heavily built, well-dressed man in a light overcoat,
coming toward her at a deliberative, dawdling gait. She put herself
directly in his path. He checked his pace to avoid a collision and
looked at her speculatively, with one hand fingering his moustache.
"Will you go with me?" she said, repeating the invitation she had used
before.
"Where to?" he said, showing interest.
"Where you please," she said in her halting speech.
"You're on," he said. He fell in alongside her, facing her about and
slipping a hand well inside the crook of her right arm.
"You--you will go with me?" she asked. Suddenly her body was in a
tremble.
"No, sister," he stated grimly, "I ain't goin' with you but you're sure
goin' with me." And as he said it he tightened his grip upon her
forearm.
He had need to say no more. She knew what had happened. She had not
spent two years and better in a New York tenement without learning that
there were men of the police--detectives they called them in
English--who wore no uniforms but went about their work apparelled as
ordinary citizens. She was arrested, that was plain enough, and she
understood full well for what she had been arrested. She made no outcry,
offered no defence, broke forth into no plea for release. Indeed her
thought for the moment was all for her half-sister and not for herself.
So she said nothing as he steered her swiftly along.
At a street light where a patrol telephone box of iron was bolted to the
iron post the plain-clothes man slowed up. Then he changed his mind.
"Guess I won't call the wagon," he said. "I happen to know it's out. It
ain't far. You and me'll walk and take the air." He turned with her
westward through the cross street. Then, struck by her silence, he asked
a question:
"A Frenchy, ain't you?"
"Yes," she told him. "I am French. Where--where are you taking me,
m'sieur? Is it to the prison--the station house?"
"Quit your kiddin'," he said mockingly. "I s'pose you don't know where
we're headin'? Night court for yours--Jefferson Market. Right over here
across town."
"They will not keep me there long? They will permit me to go if I pay
a fine, eh? A small fine, eh? That is all they will do to me, is it not
so?"
He grunted derisively. "Playin' ignorant, huh? I s'pose you're goin' to
tell me now you ain't never been up in the night court before?"
"No, no, m'sieur, never--I swear it to you. Never have I been--been like
this before."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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